Oh dear!… It seems to have been quite a little while since I have posted! Now that summer is here maybe we can find some time to write a bit more. There have been a few notable items this past month – Apple’s WWDC has come and passed, and NAMM has been held successfully – Congrats John on making it through your first of what I hope will be many NAMM shows!
Today we should take a look at Dorico and the new shiny Version 5 that was released a couple of weeks ago though! Honestly I am not revealing anything new in this post if you have been paying attention to the news straight from Dorico along with many others…. BUT I am going to give you a feeling as to what I personally find the most useful and helpful items in this update. People ask me all the time, “Why should I update?” – or “How will this benefit me, I’m just a music teacher.” So here you go – the most useful and helpful parts of this update according to a Band Director and user of tech who also does a fair bit of music notation work.
Dorico has released Version 5
Steinberg and the Dorico team have released version 5 of the outstanding notation app. I would say that this version centers around giving us many different ways in which to speed up our notating as well as giving us new ways to play those scores back that will greatly enhance what we hear. There are many improvements to take a look at and I think that a bump from 4 to 5 is well warranted as there are some seriously cool new paradigms being formed with this version that will make our work faster, more efficient and sound better!
Let’s talk about a basic item to start…. Dorico has bumped up the number of players you can work with in SE, Elements and Dorico for iPad. Considering that Dorico SE and the iPad versions are free to download and use I don’t know what is holding people back from getting started!
PLAYERS
Dorico SE (The FREE Version of Dorico) now supports up to 8 players. For FREE!
Dorico for iPad (also free to download) supports up to 8 players but if you register you can now get up to 12 players! For FREE!
Dorico Elements now allows you unlimited players and instruments – not free costs a mere $99! (And if you are in education it is $67!)
Now… let’s move on to some of the major features. Note that not ALL of the items I mention below work in ALL versions of Dorico. Head over to the Dorico.com website to check which features are available in each version of Dorico.
As I said – I think that one of the reasons version 5 is so important is that there are a large number of people who work with Dorico who also want to be able to LISTEN to their scores WITHOUT having to load up another application to have their music sound great! Seriously…. Who REALLY wants to load in ANOTHER sample library that is going to take many gigabytes of precious storage on our hard drives in order to get better sound? Dorico already has great sounds and now we have several more ways to interact with the payback of our scores that should make you very happy people! This first feature is….
STAGE AND SPACE
Dorico 5’s new Stage and Space feature makes the space in which your score is being heard a more realistic experience. It accomplishes this is an astoundingly simple user interface that hides a variety of much more complex happenings. In the past I had run across one iPad app that utilized this same sort of layout for mixing instruments and I thought at the time that it was such a simplistic layout that would make sense to every user while offering them a deeply profound response in their playback.
Dorico comes with dozens of powerful effects processors to sculpt your sound, and Dorico 5’s new Space and Stage templates make it simple to try out different configurations. The way Dorico has implemented this is gorgeous and it keeps me from having to go through part by part to set the pans and reverb sends by hand. Now I grab each instrument and drag them out and about the setup just how they would be if we were in a live setting to quickly make vast improvements in the playback of how my score sounds by simply expanding on the stereo placement of each instrument in the mix.
Make sure that once you have built up a Stage and Space for the ensemble you are working on that you save it so you can recall it for later use in future scores!
As for the Live Space settings there are some pretty nifty options here but it’d probably make more sense for you to go watch this fine YouTube Video on this subject so every is a bit clearer than simply trying to read about it. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzYp9bDBnBg
SCRUB PLAYBACK
Best feature of version 5? SCRUB PLAYBACK is going to change your life! This will quickly become one of your most used features while building and editing your scores. I can not begin to tell you how many times I am editing a score and have had a desire to listen to just a short section or a specific group of instruments. That in the past has required multiple steps to accomplish. Now with Dorico 5 we can use Scrub Playback to instantly hear and audition sections of what we are working on!
Look in the top right hand corner of you window just to the right of the tempo in the playback area. There you will find the new Scrub Playback Icon…
Turn that on and move your mouse over the audio to instantly hear your score at whatever speed you desire!
Use Control + Space on Windows or Option + Space to temporarily enable scrub while you hold those keys down and move your mouse! Add Shift to the shortcut and you will only hear the instrument directly underneath the mouse. Another sweet trick is that if Scrub Playback is enabled you can using the Left/Right arrow keys to control playback position!
Of course this feature is all about being able to quickly audition specific portions of your Score so if you want to hear only certain instruments while in Scrub Playback mode then simply make an active selection first then start Scrub Playback! Below you see that the housepainter is indicating that I am in Scrub Playback Mode and since I have active selections in more than one part I will only hear those two parts while scrubbing! How stinking sweet is THAT! Of course if I wanted to ONLY hear ONE part then use the trick mentioned in the paragraph above.
Note that while in Scrub Playback mode the score goes into a temporary read only state so you do not accidentally make errors while scrubbing it up!
PITCH CONTOUR PLAYBACK
As a Band Director I am forever teaching students how to play beyond the simple black dots on the page. One of those tips I have given for years, and was given to me as I learned, was that if the notes get higher you should get louder. The converse is true in that if you are getting lower in pitch than your volume should also be decreasing.
Dorico 5 is all about helping our scores sound more and more natural and humanized, so it has built in this simple rule as a part of all new scores. Dorico will not adjust old scores although you can turn Pitch Contour on if you so wish to do so in the PlayBack Options. In fact this even works in Dorico SE!
Now I said simple rule but the genius minds behind the programming of the app had to have worked on this feature for more than just a little while! Dorico will automatically look at your notes and apply Pitch Contour Playback to them and it will do so based off even the different staves in the same part (like for instance the right and left hand of a piano part)! Dorico is analyzing pitch of each note, the timing and the length of notes to help make the decisions of where and how much the volume should change.
In order to view the changes Dorico is adding to your part go to PlayBack Mode – cmd 4 – or simply look at the Key Editor whilst in Write Mode – cmd 2.
This is all very brilliant because normally all those Velocity levels would be stagnate and would not sound very human. That would then require us to go in manually and to draw in some velocities ourselves. Now… time is saved and our playback is that much the better! You can even scale the effect more or less depending how much change you want to hear.
OTHER PLAYBACK IMPROVEMENTS
1-Suppress playback is a brilliant playback feature that will keeps items in your score from playing back on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or whatever time you choose.
2- Playback when in key editor can be started by simply double clicking the ruler.
3- Enable Follow Playback at the bottom if you want what is on the screen o match what is being played back.
DRUM SET IMPROVEMENTS
Drum Set instruments now show up as individual tracks in playmate which allows for greater control over where each instrument is routed and which effects get applied to it. So now your snare drum can have a different EQ/Reverb setting than the rest of the kit!
MIDI TRICKS
MIDI Note 60 is middle C – otherwise known as middle C – or is it? Well now you can adjust that definition of middle C as C3, C4 or C5. For those of you who are only working with Dorico itself this means nothing to you but for those using Dorico with other VST’s this can help calm the confusion between programs!
GROOVE AGENT
OK – if you are a person who is working with Drum Set parts frequently and building up lead sheets or chord charts then it seems Goove Agent SE is something you can use if you have the full version of Dorico or Dorico Elements.
I have my eyes set on figuring this out but have not had the time yet. So instead go watch this video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsa4n4nMcAM
I will say in short that if there are useful patterns (there are something like 400 included!) in Groove Agent then this will be a super useful tool in the future allowing us to simply drag and drop preset grooves into our scores and have them notated for us!
INPUTTING NOTES
In the never ending quest to make Dorico respond to it’s users in the most natural way possible we have several new ways to create and edit that are brilliant!
Live Editing allows you to drag notes with mouse to reposition them. You can drag to a different pitch by dragging up or down. If you’d like to drag left or right it will move the notes to a new rhythmic spot in your part. Dorico senses which you are doing and will not allow you to do both moves at once. While dragging Dorico gives you some gray ghost notes so you can see where the notes will end up at!
If you hold down the alt/opt key you can quickly make copies of your selection. In fact you can even copy to another player in your score by dragging your selection a little to the right first and then to the other staff.
Dorico 5 now adds the ability to add multiple items at once. The ability to add musical markings to multiple staffs at once is pure genius. This is a very smart maneuver and even works out with great dexterity how this command should be interpreted. In the example below I selected measures 1-7 then invoked the Dynamics Popover by typing Shift D followed by typing p<f and the Dorico genies granted my wish brilliantly! Giving me a 6 measure crescendo for some parts whilst knowing it should only give me a 3 measure crescendo for other parts. Now if for strange reason this bothers you and you would rather have all parts be the same there is an option to create items at the first selected item.
What all can you add in multiple areas at once you ask – Playback Techniques like Articulations and Bowing, Glissandos, Arpeggios, Ornaments/Trills, Hairpins and much more!
TIP – This one is going to save us a LOT to tapping around – Double tap note duration key commands to get dotted notes! Hallelujah!
TIP – Add Three dots to the abbreviation cresc or dim adds a dotted line for the duration of that selection while in your Dynamics popover.
TIP – More quickly delete and add bars from the Jump bar (or even better yet set key commands that fit your workflow.
PAGE LAYOUT
1-Align rests in the same voice vertically!
2-Chord Diagrams and Chord Symbols layout have several appreciated improvements like when using slash chords with alternate bass notes you can choose to align the other chords to the top, middle or bottom of the slash chord.
3-Paragraph styles can be used for text items!
4-There are better choices now for choosing color of text and its text box.
5-We now have 8 additional music fonts that are covered under the SIL Open Font license!
6-For those of you who are in need of tweaking the exact layout of your printed music Dorico has improvements in engrave mode as well!
Notable Other Updates
Layout transposition. The read-out that shows whether the current layout is shown in Concert Pitch or Transposed Pitch has been replaced with a pair of toggle buttons, allowing you to change the current transposition directly without using the Edit menu.
View type. The drop-down menu for choosing between Page View and Galley View has been replaced with a pair of toggle buttons, saving you a click when changing the view type with the mouse.
INSTRUMENT EDITOR
Dorico 5 has given us the Instrument Editor in order to tweak, change, and create Instruments to use in our scores. As an Euphonium and Keyboard player I appreciate this so much! In many notation apps I can never find both Treble AND Bass Clef Euphonium. Now it is easy – well Dorico of course already has both BUT if for some reason I wanted let’s say a Treble Clef Euphonium part that was actually in the key of C instead of Bb then I can easily make that happen! Besides being able to make use of the Instrument Editor for simple things like creating a Native American Flute in A, B and C there are some further reasons to make use of this feature. As a Keyboard player I can now create instruments for different sounds on my MIDI Keyboards, then assign them to specific patches and then save my document as a playback template that I can later recall quickly.
Another great use is to edit the range of the instruments you are using so that if you are arranging for beginning band you will notice when you are writing outside of those players abilities or editing that range if you have advanced players who can handle playing double high c on trumpet!
Make sure to save these new instruments as defaults, by clicking on that Star icon, so they show up in other projects besides your current one.
MUSIC XML
Dorico has continued their work on improving their support of Music XML files. Dorico will now import many new ornaments, it also supports different playback techniques. For those of us who deal with scores that have transposing instruments Dorico has improved how it handles those transitions. Instruments with multiple voices such as piano will see better layout and handling of multiple voices. It is not just the import of Music XML that was worked on though because the exporting of Music XML has been improvement and now exports with better page layout options, exporting of the music and main text font used in the project. Dorico’s built-in X and Diamond, Large X and Diamond, and Large Circled notehead sets are now correctly exported to MusicXML.
Check this out too – Holds and pauses. Fermatas, breath marks, and caesuras are now imported from MusicXML files.
As a person who uses several different music notation apps in conjunction with each other I appreciate the ability to import and export Music XML files that are now more detailed!
WRAP UP
This blog post is in absolutely no way meant to be a compressive list of all things new and shiny in Dorico 5! It is meant to hit upon some of the items that are going to be the most noticeable and useful to myself while trying to get stuff done this summer. Yes…. Us teachers work throughout the summer. For me, as a high school band director, I am not really certain that there is honestly a summer break – I mean marching season is constantly at the forefront of my mind all summer what with drill writing, music arranging, color guard and percussion rehearsals and camp details to make sure we have all lined up.
Please go watch Dorico’s videos on their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@dorico
There you will be greeted with the man with the smoothest voice of all the YouTube Kingdom and he will guide you through discovering Dorico. Be it as a beginner or just learning what all has improved in version 5.
Now… go hit the update button and get making some music!
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